Crooked Vows (2 page)

She came into his life only a few months later, during his first year at the university, looking for a new direction, beginning to discover that the world was much wider and in some ways rather less wicked than he'd been led to believe. Though there's wickedness to be found everywhere.

Someone had introduced them—he can't recall who. It seems now, looking back, that the occasion marked the beginning of his real life, as if what came before was fantasy. She admitted much later that she'd had a speculative eye on him for some time and had engineered the meeting. He himself was totally inept and ignorant in negotiations of that sort; it was unexplored territory. Wilderness. He can still picture the setting quite clearly: the square of lawn, the fish pond, the façade of the university hall with its clock tower. And her.

‘Thomas', she had repeated, looking rather dubious. Too formal for her. She'd call him Tom if he didn't mind. He remembers, with a smile. A beginning. There was a great deal more than his name that was destined to be reshaped. At first he was surprised by her directness, almost taken aback. In time he learned to appreciate it, to recognise it as a level of honesty that he hadn't encountered before. They had shaken hands on that occasion. It seemed to him at the time that their hands remained in contact rather longer than a casual introduction required. He recalls the strange combination of sensations he felt during that extended moment of contact: a sudden surge of excitement flooding his whole body, which he hoped was not as obvious as he feared it might be, combined with tightness in his belly, an insecure feeling that this moment might mark the opening-up of some unpredictable possibilities. As indeed it did.

The kitchen table is strewn with letters and cards of sympathy. Cards for her. No. Cards
about
her. He must do something about organising them as well as the dishes. Wonders what people usually do. Would all those well-wishers expect a response from him?

His mind retreats into the past, to a distant memory of another card. It was for her birthday, only a week before they married. He had written
With all my love forever
, having been feeling his way gradually into territory that he had not explored until the previous couple of years.

She kissed him, then pulled back a little and looked steadily into his eyes. He must not promise her all his love, she said. They will have children, and he must keep some love for them. And
forever
is too much to promise.
Till death
do us part
is as much as anyone can sign up for. Nothing lasts forever. It was a long time before he had learned enough honesty from her to look at the facts of life with just a little of the same clear-sighted courage. He remembers her occasional sadness in her last years at the thought, which she expressed with the same honesty, that one of them was sure to go first and the other would be left alone.

He moves out to the back veranda. Ahead of sunrise the eastern sky is streaked with pale pink, repeated at closer range in a profusion of flowers on the massive apple blossom hibiscus against the back fence. It's the only plant he can remember choosing himself; the garden is usually her business. 
Was
her business.

She had been puzzled over why he was so definite about wanting that variety when he usually had no views about plants of any sort. And there were so many new varieties; every old garden had an apple blossom hibiscus.

He found it difficult to explain that this was just the point. It stood in his mind for the ordinary world of backyards and back verandas and shared beds and shared lives and children and grandchildren and the normal varieties of innocent human pleasure. And pain. Anyway, there it still stands, grown tall and broad and flowering splendidly more than forty years later.

He wonders whether that other apple blossom hibiscus is still standing. It looked like an old shrub then, fifty years ago and more. Probably by now it's only a memory—an image that pulls back with it a chain of other memories about someone who now seems like a stranger: himself when young. He thinks of Omar Khayyam, a voice from nine hundred years past, speaking thoughts that could be his own.
Myself when young
did eagerly frequent Doctor and saint, and heard great argument.

Himself when young—now a stranger who seems to have lived in another world, seen at a great distance, as if on the far side of a huge expanse of water. But the memories from that distant time and place have remained clear, and now, against the new blankness of his present and his future, they stand out even more sharply.

He sits on one of the two old cane chairs on the veranda, unable to shut out the emptiness of the other chair beside him, remembering the day when he'd painted them, and called her out to see what a strange colour the paint had turned out to be: a peculiar purplish-pink. Not at all what he'd had in mind. It didn't matter, she said, that colour would do.

He tries to push his thoughts in a less painful direction, looking up into the beginning of the new day. Tries to pinpoint the time when the first fine cracks began to appear in the wall enclosing that remote world of the mind where he lived for his first twenty-three years. Perhaps the beginning of the end was that first consultation.

2

The Unravelling Begins

Thomas's neck feels sticky with sweat. He runs a finger around the inside of his collar. Uncomfortable things, clerical collars, especially in summer. Nine years in the seminary and he still doesn't feel at ease in one. Perhaps that's the point of them: daily mortification of the flesh.

He picks up a magazine.
Time
, a couple of months old. Skims an article on the American plan to test another nuclear bomb at Bikini Atoll. Possibly a series of them. A terrible weapon, as the archbishop had written in last week's issue of
The Catholic View
, but necessary for the free world to contain the spread of communism.

The phone on the receptionist's desk rings once, then stops, and she turns towards Thomas.

‘Dr Macpherson is ready for you now.' She points to the door on the far side of the room.

He stands and crosses the room, very conscious of his legs. They seem to have impulses of their own, making jerky movements that are not fully under his control. He pushes the door open and steps stiffly into the next room.

A man with greying sandy hair looks up from a desk.

‘Mr Riordan. Thomas Riordan, I understand. Shut the door, if you don't mind, and take a seat in this chair. And please excuse me for a minute or two while I finish a couple of notes.'

He goes back to jotting in a large notebook.

Thomas lowers himself cautiously into the chair. It's a bulky, low-seated, leather-covered piece of furniture, apparently designed without regard to the shape of the human body. He hesitates between sinking back out of control and perching upright on the edge, before finally choosing to perch.

He
rubs the palms of his hands together nervously, feeling acutely aware of how conspicuously his knees are jutting up and out in front of him. He tries stretching his legs out straight with his heels on the floor. Now his substantial black shoes are standing up, toes pointing to the ceiling. This feels even clumsier. He pulls his feet back. The inconvenient knees jut up again.

Macpherson continues to write, and Thomas risks a quick direct look. Sees a middle-aged face, lean, and lined around the mouth and eyes, the greying hair cut fairly short. He thinks about the voice, the little that he heard of it. Perhaps there was a touch of Scots in the accent. The desk is bare except for the notebook in which its owner is still writing. What would he be writing about? About Thomas himself? And if so, what?

A window in the wall behind the desk looks out to an unkempt garden, overgrown shrubs merging together into a tangled dark-green barrier along the fence line.

Three walls of the room are lined with shelves almost to the ceiling, crammed with books. Substantial, serious books, most of them. He turns to focus on the shelf nearest to him. David Hume,
Treatise of Human Nature
. Thomas Hobbes,
The
Leviathan
. The names had been mentioned in lectures at the seminary. Philosophers, so-called. Sceptics, atheists, scoffers at religion. Dangerous authors. Their books are to be avoided. Benedictus de Spinoza,
Ethics
, another of the same. He has not read these books. Neither, he thought, had the lecturer who warned the students against them.

He turns back. The older man's eyes are on him. He's been watched—for how long? Perhaps the note-jotting was a screen from behind which he'd been watched for most of the time.

‘Are you interested in philosophy, Mr Riordan? You have some of my favourites here. David Hume, now, a great thinker. An Edinburgh man, I believe, as I am myself, originally. Do you know his work?' His speech is controlled, tidy, like his desk.

Thomas hesitates, uncertain how much to admit.

‘Not … not in much detail.'

‘Ah, well. A pity. But we're not here to talk about philosophy. We should make a start. And you should start by telling me how I might be able to help you.'

Thomas has been rehearsing answers to this inevitable question for days, but now he stumbles over words, shies away from any real answer.

‘I'm not … I thought that the archbishop had probably … or perhaps the archbishop's secretary–—'

‘Yes, yes. One of those gentlemen has been in touch. The second, if I remember rightly. And no doubt one of them will pay my fee in due course. It's a matter of some importance to us Scotsmen.'

He smiles, a slight, wry smile. For a moment his expression is lighter, warmer.

‘But my professional business is with you. I need to hear from you. What is it that you and I are setting out to achieve? What is the knot that needs to be unravelled?'

Thomas rubs his hands together between his knees, immediately aware of what an embarrassing habit this is, and of how difficult his knees are.

‘It's to do with my memory. I mean my memories.'

Macpherson leans back in his chair, looking at the wall somewhere above the younger man's head. His silence calls for more.

‘I seem to have lost some of them. Of my memories. Lost a few days of my life. I have no idea what I was doing over a few days.'

‘Yes. And these few days. When were they?'

‘Only … not long ago. Less than three months. The beginning of December. It's so …'

Thomas's answer dries up for a moment. He looks away from the older man's face thinking,
he must be well aware
of the facts
.
The whole State is well aware of them
. The story was all over the newspapers, emerging in fragments day by day through a couple of weeks until it was overtaken by the close approach of Christmas. A small passenger plane on a regular flight between Perth and Albany on the south coast, with a pilot and eight passengers on board, failed to arrive at its destination or to be seen or heard over several small towns along its usual route. The assumption was that it had strayed disastrously off course and disappeared, possibly into the ocean.

Then a few days later a single survivor walked into Windy Harbour, a tiny cluster of fishing shacks far to the west of the proper course: a young man, twenty-three years old, a student priest on the verge of ordination, on his way to a short placement as parish assistant in Albany. He is miraculously unhurt except for sunburn and blistered feet, neither of them the sort of injury associated with plane crashes.

Searchers took another two days to locate the crash site in isolated forest country near the coast—what was left of the plane, and what was left of its other occupants.

But one was unaccounted for: a young woman. Trackers found evidence that she too had survived the crash without major injury. Footprints around the site suggested that she was walking with a limp, but without really serious difficulty. Two sets of prints led from the area to the coast a couple of miles away. There were traces of the same tracks heading west along the coast, though tracking was difficult across sandy beaches, where most marks were washed out daily by waves and tide, alternating with bare rocky headlands.

These few facts were clear and widely known. Two people had survived the crash and started on the trek to safety. And only one, the young student priest, had arrived at the cluster of fishing shacks that was the only place of human habitation along a hundred miles of wild coast. And that one survivor could say nothing about what had happened to the other. Or
would
say nothing; some reporting had been ambiguous, sceptical.

Macpherson's questions and silences press Thomas to recount all of this. Then he leans forward, elbows on the desk.

‘Well, then. That is what we know. More or less. What we don't know, because of this gap in your memories, is what happened between the crash and your arriving at Windy Harbour. And my task, as I understand it, is to help you to recover those memories, if possible. Is that your understanding of the situation?'

Thomas nods, looking away.

‘There's one point I'd like you to clarify for me. I don't fully understand why it is so important for you to recover the memories. No doubt I've done numerous things myself that I don't remember. But I don't consult analysts to get all my memories back. I'm probably better off for forgetting some of them.'

He smiles briefly, the same wry smile, and sits back in his chair.

Thomas, perched uncomfortably on the edge of the chair, looks at the floor.

‘I've been studying for ordination. I was … I mean I am to be ordained a priest. Quite soon.'

‘So I gathered. A Roman Catholic priest.'

The young man considers the word
Roman
which is
almost never used among Catholics about themselves. It's seen as verging on an insult. After all, what other sorts of Catholics are there? Should he take offence? Was it meant to be provocative, perhaps only slightly? Probably not. He picks up the thread of his explanation.